Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy Review)

August 1, 2025 by 5 Comments

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.

From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations.
Link to the Patch

The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.

Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.

This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.

Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.

And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.

Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.

The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.

As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.

Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.

Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?

Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.

When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.

As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.

Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.

The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.

I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah.
Verdict: YES!

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Virtual Boy Wario Land (Review)

December 7, 2023 by 2 Comments

Virtual Boy Wario Land
Platform: Virtual Boy. I mean, duh. It’s in the name!
First Released November 27, 1995
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Hirofumi Matsuoka
Developed by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*Coming in 2026 to Switch Online Expansion Pack in 2025. Requires special accessory for 3D effect. No clue if people can opt out of that or not and just play the games.

This one was a lot harder to get action-based screenshots than you would think thanks to how Wario’s tackle/charge move looks.

When I first ran through Virtual Boy’s library back in 2020, two games stood out to me as being pretty dang good. Then I replayed Mario Clash earlier this year and I realized it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I originally pegged it to be. I still ultimately gave it a YES!, but barely so, and I’ve been dreading replaying Virtual Boy Wario Land ever since. It was the other unambiguously good Virtual Boy game, but maybe I’d set my expectations for Virtual Boy so low that it messed with my initial perception. Thankfully, now that I’ve finished my second play session with it, I don’t have to stare blankly at the screen and ask myself if I had a good time or not. It’s really good. And painful to play, but hey, if you’re going to fry your eyeballs out of their sockets, do it with sprites this beautifully done. Shame about it being on Virtual Boy, where it’s fated to linger in obscurity, unloved, until the end of time. (Update: Or not!)

Wario once had a game animated by the same people who did Ghost in the Shell, so it might be audacious for me to say this, but I’m saying it anyway: this has the best sprite work in Wario Land history. Some of the best in Nintendo history, in fact. It’s a solid decade ahead of its time. Very cartoon-like.

At only ten stages and four boss fights, it’s a short game. I’ve never needed more than two hours to finish it. While the levels are sprawling, only a couple I would consider to be “maze-like.” Each of the ten stages has a key and a hidden treasure somewhere in it. In this second play-through, I only one time made it to the exit of the stage without holding the key. Nine of ten times, I just happened upon it through the normal progression of the game. The hidden treasures were a little more difficult. VB Wario Land has six possible endings, the two best of which require you to find all ten of the treasures. Four times I had to do extra exploring to find them. It works, though. Above all else, Wario Land as a franchise needs to feel like a treasure hunt. VB Wario Land pulls it flawlessly. You actually do have to explore, and my only complaint is that there’s only two things to find in every stage. I think perhaps they should have required more than one key to finish a level. I strongly suspect that was planned at some point, but then someone said “do we really want our players to keep their eyeballs on this thing longer than we have to?”

My proof is that there’s more rooms that have this pattern, but they have 1ups instead of treasure. It makes no sense to make a big deal of extra lives since extra lives are plentiful and the game is absurdly easy. No, I think they had more ambitious plans that had to be dropped because of the platform’s ability to broil your retinas.

Of course, a well done treasure hunt doesn’t mean anything if the levels are boring to explore. That’s certainly not the case here. VB Wario Land has some of the best 2D levels Nintendo has ever built. With the exception of the first level, which has no personality or theme to speak of, VB Wario Land has excellent set pieces. Sure, they’re mostly the typical cliches of forests, deserts, waterfalls, etc. But they all feel fresh here. Breathtaking backgrounds and even mundane pathways are drawn with attention to detail. They have this otherworldly quality to them that few 2D platformers achieve quite like VB Wario Land does. It also helps that the enemies all have authentic personalities. Wario is a mischievous character, and this is one of the few times where every aspect of the game feels like it belongs to him, and him alone. It’s so well done.

Go figure that an all-red platform would have some of the best underwater sections in platforming history.

The big twist in this Wario Land is the ability to transfer from the foreground to the background. This is usually done with springs that launch you back and forth. Other times, you’ll access one or the other via doors or pipes. There’s even extended sections that take place entirely in the background. While it’s fun and it works, it’s also one of the reasons the game is so easy. There’s rarely anything in the background that can hurt you. I also feel the mechanic was underutilized. Early in the game, the backgrounds are mostly used as bonus areas where coins or hearts are found. Later, shifting between the foregrounds and backgrounds is more incorporated into the maze-like layouts of the level, and the game truly finds its footing as one of the all-timers. It just takes a while to get there. The springing between the foreground and background is also incorporated into two of the four boss fights, both of which are among the highlights of the game.

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Virtual Boy Wario Land’s weakness is that it’s probably the easiest platforming game Nintendo ever made. I’ve played this three times now. Once on Halloween in 2020, and twice this session, including the “harder” second quest, and I’ve still never lost a single life playing VB Wario Land. Enemies are mostly toothless. In this session, even while playing the second quest, I never took damage from a single basic enemy. In the second quest, I did get hit by the spiky balls that are laying everywhere and I damaged myself on the first mini-boss when I was too slow to attack it, but otherwise, not one single basic enemy ever hurt me. And it’s not because I have mad skills or anything like that. Most baddies don’t hurt you when you touch them, even if you’re not attacking. They just bounce off you. It’s so awkward. I’ve made jokes before about the silliness of the video game logic that enemies are lethal to the touch no matter what they’re doing, but Virtual Boy Wario Land is a glimpse into what gaming would be like if that weren’t the case. There’s also no pits to fall into. The Wario Land that followed this removed the ability to lose a life altogether. I can’t help but wonder if that was discussed for this one, too?

Before each boss, you have to fight these tiny robotic mini-bosses by avoiding their attacks and waiting for them to fly up in the air and crash down on you, which exposes a button. They each only take two hits to kill. In the second quest, you have to hop before they crash, because they only expose the button for a split second. It was the first time (and the only time, come to think of it) that VB Wario Land was anything resembling challenging.

As if the enemy designs weren’t weak enough, VB Wario Land has absolutely no balance when it comes to power-ups. Frankly, they went overboard. The standard Wario bull-charge would have been satisfying enough. It’s one of my all-time favorite game attacks. You can also just jump on enemies, which will knock them out and allow them to be carried, but they’re a bit unwieldy. The charge/tackle move, however, is always delightful. The fact that your butt causes earthquakes that disable every enemy on screen is insanely overpowered and shouldn’t have been included, but it’s Wario. I guess it’s okay! Hell, had they kept it at that, it’s likely the game would have been a contender for Nintendo’s best platformer ever. But, they didn’t. There’s a dragon helmet that breathes fire, though its range is limited to a few spaces in front of you. Some of the blocks can only be broken by fire, and sometimes you need fire to find the special treasure (I’m almost certain you never need it to find the key). It destroys most enemies and has unlimited ammo and would be overpowered by itself. There’s also an eagle helmet that lets you dash in the air and fly for a short distance, which can get you over large gaps. It’s fun to use. So far, that sounds pretty normal, right?

They might as well roll the credits once you have this.

The problem is the dragon and eagle helmets stack to form a winged dragon that can both fly and fire projectiles the full length of the screen. It’s very useful for exploring, since the projectiles it shoots pierces all blocks (though it does stop with enemies), allowing you to clear out entire rooms worth of blocks in a second or two. But, it also allows you to instantly vaporize nearly every basic enemy as soon as you get them within sight. After getting the winged dragon helmet, I almost ran the table on VB Wario Land. The next time I took damage, it was while attempting to score the final hit against the final boss of the game. Once you have it, assuming you actually take your time to measure every jump, the only remaining challenges will be the bosses, since they can’t be damaged by your attack. There’s no particularly difficult jumps, either. Your own recklessness is all that stands in front of you and the end credits. The play control won’t screw you over, either. VB Wario Land handles like a dream. A surreal, all-red, eye-bleeding dream.

Even on the second quest, enemies pose little to no threat. This thing is one of the few that are immune to your projectiles, but it’s not like it’s hard to kill. Really, the second quest could be called Wario’s Adventures in Spiky Ball Land because it’s basically all spiky balls, all the time.

The second quest really isn’t harder so much as it’s just more annoying. The treasures and keys were in the same locations as they were before. Enemies were still nothing more than cannon-fodder. The bosses and even mini-bosses did attack faster and had smaller windows for vulnerability, but otherwise, it was the same game. Only now, there were tons of spiky balls laying around, so many that you literally have to crawl through many sections. Some were even placed in a way where it made getting some coins impossible. Was it harder? Obviously not, since the second time I beat Virtual Boy Wario Land almost exactly thirty minutes faster than my previous session. And the second time around, I skipped the after-level extra lives bonus round (which I don’t think counts towards time anyway). I didn’t need it and still finished with 20 lives. That’s owed largely to the unbalanced power-ups. If Nintendo were to remake VB Wario Land, adding more levels would be a given, but actually, the biggest change I’d recommend making is removing the winged dragon helmet. It’s just too overpowered. Besides, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the bull charge is (in my head canon, Wario is cousins with Bald Bull).

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I get the impression VB Wario Land is meant for a much younger, less experienced audience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 2D platformer that’s better suited to introduce young children to 2D exploration-based platforming than Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo should fully colorize it, restore its original name (Wario Cruise) and give it a modern release. They won’t, but they ought to. I’m not sure re-releasing this in the state it’s in would be the wisest move. I wanted to test this on my nieces and nephew. They were excited, too! But, I decided to cancel the plan because my eyes were hurting after playing it. I’m not making a joke here, either. I’ve been rubbing them and squinting a lot ever since I finished, and I’m not going to put them through that. The same thing happened to me when I played Mario Clash earlier this year. What the hell was Nintendo thinking when they made Virtual Boy? I wasn’t even playing on a real one and my eyes are killing me. Don’t tell me the designers at Nintendo didn’t experience the same thing during its development. There’s no way they didn’t. But, despite legitimate eye soreness, I can honestly say what hurts worse is that VB Wario Land is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Even though it lacks difficulty, the joy of exploring the levels and finding the treasures is undeniable. Maybe it’s not the absolute best “lost” Nintendo game, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to forever wallow in obscurity. As far as their hidden gems go, it shines among the brightest. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so sore right now.
Verdict: YES!

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